14nm delivers substantial gains

On February 14, Samsung announced that its new 14nm Exynos 7 Octa processor entered a volume production. When compared to Samsung’s planar 20nm technology, this new process enables up to 20 percent higher performance, 35 percent lower power consumption and an overall productivity gain of 30 percent. Bear in mind that the Galaxy S5 has a 28nm Snapdragon 801, not a 20nm Exynos, and that the performance and efficiency gap should be even wider.

T-Mobile Austria was one of the few places helped us find out a bit more about the processor. There were no big surprises. The site lists it as Exynos 7420 (14nm) (64-bit, A57 2.1G Quad + A53 1.5G Quad). In a sense the basic specification and the choice of cores puts this CPU very close to the Snapdragon 810 processor, but it's a different story in the GPU and modem department.

The Snapdragon 810 also supports native 64-bit and has four Cortex-A57 cores at 2.0GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.5GHz, but it is a planar 20nm chip. This means that head-to-head the Exynos 7420 should end up faster, while at the same time delivering superior battery life. We have to wait for some real-world tests to see the efficiency gains in action, but initial benchmarks look very promising indeed. Another thing to consider is throttling. The Snapdragon 810 suffers from aggressive throttling on the LG Flex 2, but thanks to the more advanced process, the Exynos should cope with extended load somewhat better. While the official max clock is just 100MHz on the Exynos, the processor should be able to sustain it for much longer periods of time.

Exynos 7420 and in-house Cat 6 modem

Perhaps the most surprising part of the new platform is the modem. Samsung hasn’t gone on record about the modem, but according Sammobile it should be using model SS333, or Exynos Modem 333, an in-house modem. Samsung only tells the press that it is using a Cat. 6 LTE modem.

This modem can achieve speeds of 300Mbits, making it more than capable of offering a great internet experience. Cat 6 enables the Galaxy S6 to connect to two spectrums at once, aggregating both to give faster download speeds. The iPhone 6 supports LTE Category 4, offering up to 150Mbps downlink data rates and 50Mbps uplink speeds.

Qualcomm has an LTE Cat.10 capable modem to offer up to 450 Mbps downlink via 3x carrier aggregation and up to 100Mbps uplink using 2x aggregation, but most carriers simply don’t have the infrastructure to support it, at least not yet.

There is no doubt that from the hardware perspective the Galaxy S6 has the most advanced processor in the market, leaning heavily on using the world's first mobile 14nm SoC and reaping many advantages of this new process, while Qualcomm and the rest of the competition just started 20nm manufacturing and sales. That said, 2015 will be interesting year to watch in the mobile space, as FinFET becomes an option for high end SoCs and 28nm becomes even cheaper, allowing manufacturers to use more powerful chips in entry level devices.

As for 20nm, it will still be around, but with limited capacity and higher costs than 28nm, it does not have much of a future.

HTC has not been doing particularly well in the mainstream market, but the new plan is to win 25 percent of the market in this sub-$200 segment this year, at least in Taiwan.

The company that sells some of the best high-end Android phones on the market fails to price its mainstream products properly. For example, the HTC Desire 620 is hard to get in Europe, and is priced at €270 or more, while the HTC Desire 610, a year old model, is available in select markets for €199, but this phone comes with a rather outdated Snapdragon 400 SoC.

The company has announced a new phone that might fix this mainstream mess. The Desire 626 follows the design language of the HTC Desire Eye, but it comes at more reasonable price. The phone is currently launched in Taiwan, but it might find its way to other markets as well. It comes with a Snapdragon 410 64-bit quad core SoC, 5-inch 720p display and LTE. The Desire 626 is priced at NT$5990 and that translates to $190. Getting as much as 25 percent of mainstream market is a big goal, but with the right pricing and specs, the company might have a chance.

The Snapdragon 410 comes with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.2GHz and this SoC aims to replace Snapdragon 400 that didn't come with LTE in most cases. Both SoCs are manufactured in 28nm LP, no surprise there.

The HTC Desire 626 has 1 GB RAM, 16GB memory and microSD slot support, 13-megapixel camera and 5-megapixel front camera, with supporting for Full HD video. It comes with LTE (1, 3, 5, 7, 8 and 28) , Bluetooth 4.0 as well as standard Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. The phone has a 2000mAh battery and probably comes with Android 4.4.4 with Sense 6. There is no word on the official OS and if it will ever upgrade to Android 5.0, although it's safe to assume that HTC will roll out an update.

What we see missing from the spec is dual SIM support, but we are sure that if they go after China or India, they will have a dual SIM version as well.

We can only hope that this device will make its way to Europe, US and other markets as it looks interesting. HTC is well known for launching a lot of phones regionally, so you never know. This one looks at like an interesting Moto G 2 alternative.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 will end up in most of high-end phones next year and along with its eight 64-bit cores it has a quite powerful modem too. The new modem supports Category 9 Carrier Aggregation and peaks speeds of 410 Mbits over three 20MHz LTE carriers.

Modems are quite unique devices and so far Qualcomm is the king of the market, especially when it comes to integration of top notch modems on powerful SoCs. It turns out that Huawei has the infrastructure to support the new LTE-A '4G+' network, which is a fancy name for LTE Category 9 Carrier Aggregation implemented in Snapdragon 810 modem.

Category 9 Carrier Aggregation allows EE to aggregate 20MHz of 1800MHz spectrum with another 20MHz of 2.6GHz, and a third carrier of 15MHz of 2.6GHz.

We expect to see many phones based on the 20nm Snapdragon 810 SoC, including the latest phones from Samsung, HTC and LG as well as the other players. Many of these announcements will take place at the Mobile World Congress in early March 2015 and we expect to see the phones in retail later that month or in early April.

Luckily there is some competition in the LTE space, especially thanks to MediaTek that has a nice eight core 64-bit processor with LTE Cat 4 support and we are sure that in 2015 MediaTek will introduce additional designs to put some pressure on Qualcomm, at least in the mainstream market. Mediatek already took huge chunks of the Chinese market and is expanding to other markets as we speak.

One of the first 20nm chips that we actually cared about is the Gobi 9x35 LTE Advanced Cat 6 modem, capable of achieving hitting the magical 300Mbps mark, has been shipping since Q2 2013 and is available in the Samsung Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A in Korea. Korea is the first country to have an LTE Advanced Cat 6 network with speeds up to 300Mbps and we Qualcomm informed us that more countries and more devices are coming soon.

Qualcomm said that its new Snapdragon 808 and 810 32- and 64-bit chips are coming in the first half of 2015 and there is no indication that any other mobile chipmaker will ship 20nm parts this year. It is just Apple for now.

20nm 9X35 is power efficient

As you can imagine 20nm-based 9x35 Gobi Cat 6 modems are more power efficient than the older 28nm parts and naturally they need less power. At the same time older 28nm Gobi chips are probably a tad cheaper and they can reach the speeds of 150 Mbps, which is good enough for almost all markets, as faster services are not available yet.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A is also powered by the Snapdragon 805 SoC and Gobi 9x35 LTE Advanced Cat 6 modem combo. It turns out that LG G3 Cat 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE Cat 6 and Samsung Galaxy Note Edge are using the same combo, so there will be at least a few 300Mbps-capable phones in time for the holiday season.

iPhone 6 using 28nm MDM9625

This made us wonder about Apple’s strategy. iFixit, a bunch of amazing guys who know how to gut any gadget and show the world what is inside it, has discovered something quite interesting about the iPhone 6 LTE modem. We were surprised to see that the iPhone 6 has the Qualcomm MDM9625M LTE modem, which is a 28nm chip. This chip has been shipping since 2011 and supports LTE Category 4, offering up to 150 Mbps downlink data rates and 50 Mbps uplink data rates.

As you can imagine a 20nm 300Mbps modem chip would be a better choice, but Apple decided against it. We won't go any deeper than that but just imagine, its biggest competitor has two phones with much faster LTE-A. High-speed Cat 6 LTE will work in only a few countries including Hong Kong (China), Philippines, Singapore and South Korea.

In Europe Czech Republic, Estonia, Holland, Rumania, Russia, Spain Switzerland and UK apparently have some sort of Cat 6 network. Australia has a Cat 6 network while the Middle East, Africa and the Americas do not have Cat 6 networks.

When it comes to any kind of high end phone and LTE, Qualcomm is the clear winner with MediaTek having some serious catching up to do. Nvidia, Intel and Marvell have a tiny share in the LTE market, while Broadcom wants to get out.

We spent quite a bit of time at MWC and later that week at the embedded show talking with people about LTE and the next steps in LTE evolution. In the process we learned something interesting.

Main US providers using LTE are thinking about LTE Advanced that will let you get your speed to 100Mbits and 150Mbits respectively. These are also called as LTE Cat 3 and LTE Cat 4. And all the sudden Intel and a few others are talking about LTE Cat 6 support.

LTE Cat 6 is a new technology that uses 2x20 MHz channels and can reach the speeds of 300Mbits download and 50Mbit upload. These actual speeds are unlikely to ever happen in your mobile device anytime soon, but this is the theoretical peak bandwidth. PC Magazine did a nice real life test of US carriers and you can check out their conclusions here.

It turns out that 16.55Mbits download and 7.43Mbits is the national average on AT&T on the test conducted in many parts of US. Verizon and T-mobile are at 12.07Mbit and 7.09Mbit upload while Verizon is at third place with 11.93Mbit download and 6.25Mbit upload. These are LTE Cat 3 networks capable of 100Mbit download and 50Mbit upload.

The maximum speed that these guys saw was 66.11Mbits for AT&T, 62.03Mbits for T-mobile and 59.83Mbits for Verizon LTE and were peak downloads that can happen in the best case scenario. So USA has to upgrade to LTE Cat 4 and increase to speeds to 150 Mbits and Cat 6 will take a long time to actually see any benefit. Even when it comes we doubt that you will see 300Mbit per second, but even a steady 66Mbit average sounds quite good with current speeds in mind.

Just to prove our point, you need 5 to 7 Mbits for full HD Netfix streaming and for 4K Netflix demoed at CES 2014, you will need roughly double or 15.6 Mbits for a stable 4K stream. The average LTE connection will barely hit that and again, have in mind that USA has cell blind spots all over the country and that 4G is still limited to big urban populated areas, with some exceptions.

Europe has slowly started with LTE rollouts in mid-2013 with some serious deployment is expected in 2014 but for the most part it is still very small compared to a HSDPA use on the old continent.

Bottom line, you should not care that much if your phone is Cat 4 or Cat 6 capable (Cat 5 has the same speed as CAT 6) unless you want to keep it for many years to come. Most phones including the new Samsung Galaxy S5 with Snapdragon 801 support LTE Advanced Cat 4 and everything else that is on the market including LG G2, iPhone 5S, Galaxy Note 3, Sony Xperia Z2 all have LTE Cat 4 at best.

Qualcomm's Gobi 9x35 chip is the world’s first LTE 6 capable chip to ship, and it is the first 20nm modem too. It is shipping to customers today and we would not be surprised to see this one inside of iPhone 6 as we got if confirmed that Apple's next SoC doesn’t have an integrated LTE modem inside. It turns out that phones equipped with Snapdragon 805 will also have all integrated LTE Advanced Category 6 with support for 300 Mbit max speeds but from what we know Snapdragon 805 comes in the second half of 2014, possibly with LG G3 as one of the first devices to be based on it.

We spent a fair amount of time talking to Intel engineers about LTE and we learned a few things about Intel’s plans. The current LTE network deployed in the US and some parts of the word including Europe should be able to easily upgrade to CAT 6 LTE.The same scenario happened with LTE Advanced that could theoretically take you to 150 Mbit speeds and Cat 6 promises speeds of 300 Mbits per second.

We saw a simulation on an Intel Merrifield based phone with the XMM 7260, but the engineer we talked to said that these are the “best case scenario” numbers. The actual download and upload speeds will vary based on location, number or people connected to that particular antenna, the content they are using, distance from antenna and the broadband that will be connected to that LTE carrier antenna.

LTE starts to play very important role in many European countries and that started to happen only in the latter part of 2013. Initial deployment is ongoing, which is good news for phone manufacturers as they will have the chance to sell new phones with brand and shiny faster LTE.

Despite these miraculous 300Mbps claims, in reality most people in the US, California for example are happy if they can get 20 to 30 Mbits per second despite the theoretical limit of 150 Mbit per second with LTE A that is currently deployed.

The reality is not so generous, as the actual maximum speed is a bit lower in the real world.

Asus decided to sideline the Mobile World Congress 2014 and did not go for a big event it had at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this year, but it did announce two new versions of its Asus Fonepad 7, a 7-inch tablet with phone capabilities.

The first is the Fonepad 7 LTE which features pretty much the same specs as the original version, including a 7-inch IPS 1280x800 screen, dual-core Intel Atom Z2560 SoC backed by 1GB of RAM, 5-megapixel rear and 1.2-megapixel front camera, 8GB of internal memory and 3,950mAh battery, but also, and as the name suggests, has 4G LTE connectivity as well.

The second is a different, as this one features dual-SIM support, 3G connectivity and a bit less powerful 1.2GHz clocked Atom Z2520 SoC, but still keeps the rest of the hardware specifications the same.

In addition to the two new FonePad 7 versions, Asus also showcased its earlier announced PadFone, PadFone mini and the ZenPhone at MWC 2014 booth.

Unfortunately, it did not shed any details regarding the price or the availability date for the two new Fonepad 7 devices.

]]>bobo [AT] fudzilla [DOT] com (Slobodan Simic)MobilesTue, 25 Feb 2014 15:38:00 +0100Apple is not working on its in house LTEhttp://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/33950-apple-is-not-working-on-its-in-house-lte
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/33950-apple-is-not-working-on-its-in-house-lte

It has Qualcomm for it

Our well informed industry sources are quite sure that Apple is not working on its own LTE modem. To put things in perspective, high-end phone chips such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 come in an SoC package that includes the LTE 150Mbits per second capable modem. Apple A7 doesn’t have that and neither does Intel, Nvidia or Samsung with its SoC.

Nvidia will have LTE inside the Tegra 4i. Intel has something in the works, a SoC that will have an integrated Sofia LTE, but only in 2015. Mediatek, a company that it gaining a lot of ground, should have an integrated SoC with LTE on board a chip that might fight the Tegra 4i and it might be a fierce competitor.

Apple on the other hand will focus on making a fast 64-bit ARM-based successor to the Cyclone-based Apple A7, possibly codenamed A8, and this chip will once again be a big piece of silicon without an integrated LTE modem. Apple will continue to use Qualcomm’s external LTE chip for next iPhone, for the sake of argument let's call it an iPhone 6.

Apple traditionally allocates a huge portion of a SoC for graphics and we have no doubt that Apple will continue to offer great GPU performance, but in 2014, we believe that Tegra K1 or its Denver 64-bit sibling might take the GPU crown for the 2014. There is also Qualcomm with the Snapdragon 805 and Adreno 420, but we will have to wait and see as Adreno 420 doesn’t look faster than Tegra K1 at this point.

When it comes to integrated LTE, in the high end Qualcomm will remain a sole player as Tegra K1 doesn’t have an integrated modem, Apple its approach with LTE on a dedicated chip and Samsung will use Qualcomm modems or SoCs for many markets where LTE matters.

Chief Inspector Jacques Clouseau will get a new job checking that French 4G service providers are not serving up a rubbish service. Low-cost operator Iliad this month added 4G service to its Free Mobile offers without raising the price, putting pressure on leading telecoms companies Orange, Vivendi's SFR and Bouygues Telecom to follow suit with competitive offers.

But this has also meant a handbags at dawn war between the telcos. Orange chief executive Stephane Richard accusing Iliad of compromising quality on its 4G service. Iliad is still building its mobile network and had 700 mobile antennas capable of handling 4G speeds as of December 1.

The minister, Fleur Pelleting, said the government would act to ensure that the telecom regulator Arches regained the power to enforce quality standards. Recently a Constitutional Court ruling prevented it from imposing penalties. She told Le Parisian daily that the government wanted to give the telecoms policeman his stick back.

The Iliad offer has led to a price war as well as a war of words among the telecom operators. Orange said some of its customers would get 4G wireless at no additional charge, shortly after smaller rival Bouygues extended the same offer to its low-cost subscription plan.